The Banner Saga Post-funding Update #20: Progress Report
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A first release is fast approaching
As a lot of the mundane but time-consuming aspects of running a business settle down (changing banks and setting up quickbooks... ugh), we've now entered a very critical period of development. As we've mentioned before, we're working exclusively on the combat system for the full game now, and we'll be releasing this combat as a free standalone called Factions, in the near future. A free demo with both single player and multiplayer content, if you will. We're just now transitioning from alpha to beta on this combat release, which means going from playable to polished and balanced. This is a pretty critical part of the process and we're all buckling down for an intense couple of months.
Entering beta not only lets us test final, fully functional combat but it also allows our sound developers and composer to start implementing their work and we can finally get all the animations and particles tied up to each action.
Big progress so far this month:
'¢ We've dedicated a lot of time to playtesting the combat and balancing the 18 unique classes we'll be shipping with. They're as finished as they're going to get until beta.
'¢ We've designed and created almost every UI (user interface) screen in the game where you can buy new units, upgrade them, build your party and enter different combat scenarios, in addition to creating all the UI for the combat itself which is a bigger task than one might think.
'¢ We've now completed a first pass on almost every design document we'll need for the game, including the quest system, combat spreadsheets, achievements, item system, history and lore guides, along with a final timeline through the entire game. As most developers can tell you, these sort of design docs are never really complete but continue to get updated and tweaked throughout production.
'¢ We've laid the foundation for most of the toolsets we need to build the content; including a world building tool, class editor, ability editor, and are continuing to work on the item creator and the battle map editor.
'¢ We've gotten every contractor we need ready to go, signed and accounted for.
'¢ We're officially set up with accounting.
'¢ Powerhouse Animation has delivered 90% of the character animations for our first release and are now at work on special abilities and advanced class variations.
'¢ Our hand-animated 2D cinematic is well under way. Having nearly finished the blocking and rough pass, Powerhouse has just begun work on the cleanup. Austin Wintory has already laid down a preliminary track for this and it sounds fantastic.
'¢ We've just now wrapped up the main "hub" for our first release, which has allowed us to produce a ton of art content for the full game that we'll be able to use to populate the world. This hub is the sprawling merchant city of Strand. Check out the small version below and our forums for a full-sized version, which should be up later today.
